Recently, I've been trying a bit harder to work through my oversized backlog of unfinished and unplayed games, which is mostly the result of too many impulsive purchases of irresistibly inexpensive bundles. They never put more than the tiniest dent in my wallet but now threaten to take a substantial chunk of my time left on Earth if ever I am to say I've played them all. My admittedly questionable strategy thus far has been guaranteed quantity over probable quality: rather than trying to play the best games first, I've been trying to knock out a lot of short games to make the perceived size of the list itself a bit less intimidating. This means I'm finally trying a lot of the games which I never would have thought to purchase if they hadn't come bundled with more attractive games. Sometimes, these small-scale indie games turn out to be hidden gems (which, if you were wondering, is why I play them at all). Other times, I'm not so lucky.
Last weekend, I spent about two hours playing through Pneuma: Breath of Life — which is better described as a tech demo than a game, just barely avoids classification as a "walking simulator" with the inclusion of a few mechanically interesting but ultimately far-too-easy puzzles, and tries (and fails) to be deep and meaningful in an obnoxiously unoriginal way. To be fair, I feel that the game would have been entirely bearable if not for the protagonist's incessant pseudo-philosophical jabbering and generally unfunny commentary. Alas, however, I played with the speakers turned on.
This weekend, I got to the end of Neverending Nightmares, which has a great visual style and a nice soundtrack, but suffers from an insufficient density of actual, meaningful, engaging gameplay. There are some monsters to avoid and a few items to find, but most rooms hold nothing at all of interest except for the opportunity to watch the slow-moving protagonist drag his feet from one door to the next. Maybe all this emptiness was meant to build suspense and anticipation for the scary parts, but it doesn't quite do that. It just becomes boring. I'd absolutely love a game with the aesthetics of Neverending Nightmares and the gameplay mechanics of Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, but no such thing exists as far as I know.
I sometimes consider myself to be a connoisseur of unpopular and forgotten games — those which are not quite bad, but arguably mediocre, rough around the edges and unrefined, charming in a way that the "Game of the Year" will never be, and more memorable than yet another highly-polished but necessarily generic blockbuster marketed to the widest possible audience. Although I do enjoy the more mainstream games, which have certainly earned their place at the top, I also appreciate attempts at innovation and originality even when the final product is flawed. Rather than demanding perfection in games, I simply want to see things I've never seen before.
So I guess I consider myself to be a somewhat open-minded individual when it comes to video games. I am, however, rapidly becoming less tolerant of games in which far too much time is spent simply moving from point A to point B. And don't even get me started on games which consist entirely of moving from point A to point B. It's not original; no boundaries are being shattered; it's not 2007 anymore and you're not Jason Rohrer creating Passage. So stop it.
Don't get me wrong; I love what independent developers have done for the game industry, in general. But at some point, developers and consumers of independent games began to believe not only that video games can/should/must be "art" (an opinion with which I do not wholly disagree) but also that video games can/should/must become "art" by being less interactive (which, I think, is ridiculous). The deliberate abandonment of challenge and consequent loss of any engaging gameplay, in favor of light "exploration" (too often of a mostly linear path) and passive "experience" (of moving through the virtual environment of an interactive story), has become far too normal in indie "game" development.
Although I do acknowledge the value of something like Dear Esther (with the stipulation that such products should not be marketed as games at all), I also believe that an interactive experience which requires constant input from the player should be more engaging than Dear Esther is. The player should never be forced to spend more than a minute simply moving from one place to another, with no obstacles or challenges in between. If obstacles or challenges are not desired, then the requirement of constant input from the player is a nuisance. I used to believe that Dear Esther could actually be a good "game" if there were some puzzles to solve along the way, but "Dear Esther with puzzles" is exactly what games like Mind: Path to Thalamus and Pneuma: Breath of Life try to be, and they're not quite effective. Mind: Path to Thalamus at least has some decent puzzles and less of the pointless point-A-to-point-B non-gameplay, but you'll still spend too much time wishing you could walk faster while the narrator philosophizes.
As for games like Neverending Nightmares, I can only assume that developers sometimes run out of ideas and try to beef up the playtime with lots of nothing in between the good parts. This is an awful idea. If your game has 20 minutes of fun, make it a 20-minute game and set the price accordingly. Don't add a bunch of empty rooms and force the player to walk through them. Don't make the game overly repetitive and decrease the player's movement speed. Increased playtime is worth nothing if the extra time spent isn't any fun.
Yesterday, notoriously awful "gaming" website Polygon posted the first thirty minutes of the new Doom game's single-player mode on YouTube. There's no indication of who was playing, but it's pretty safe to assume it was indeed a Polygon employee, not just because it came from their YouTube account but because it's likely that the incompetent goons who write for Polygon are exactly this bad at video games:
I don't really need to make fun of this video. It speaks for itself. I don't need to spend any more than this one sentence expressing my mixed feelings of dismay and amusement that there might actually be a real person in the world who is so bad at a video game and yet so sure that the footage is good enough to share with the world, because I know everyone else feels the same.
But even now that I've accepted and learned to live with the fact that someone most likely got paid to record this video, there are so many other secondary and tertiary reasons to be upset:
"Lockdown in effect." Maybe it's just that this is the beginning of the game and the player is assumed to be in need of some tutorial lessons in a controlled environment. Maybe this "lockdown" sequence is a recurring event in a game which turns out to be what I fear most: a series of mandatory fights in a linear series of rooms, with only the occasional open area or branching path. Either way, it's just too "modern gaming" for a product whose destiny, I thought, was to pander to the nostalgic fans of an older Doom which featured less hand-holding and allowed more freedom to explore.
Tiny little cut scenes. I've known about it since the first trailer for the game, but it still bothers me. New gun? Tiny cut scene. New item? Tiny cut scene. Push the magic "look how awesomely I can kill this bad guy" button next to an enemy whose suddenly glowing body is supposedly an indication that he's about to die? Tiny cut scene. Drop from a great height? Tiny cut scene. It breaks the flow of what might otherwise have been a nice run-and-gun game worthy of being called Doom. But hey, what do I know? I'm just some old guy who remembers the '90s.
This bad video makes the game look bad (graphics aside, of course). That's probably why I'm nit-picking about minor aspects of the game instead of appreciating what it does right, like blood and guts.
This video is probably bait. Really, could anyone be this proudly awful at a game? It was probably done for attention. Surely the video has gotten more views for being awful than it would have gotten for being half-decent. And here I am contributing to that.
These people get paid to write video games news and reviews. I'm mad about this whether the video is serious or not. If they intentionally made the video so bad with the hope that their stupidity would go viral, I don't trust them to report on video games. If they are really this bad at video games, I don't trust them to review video games.
Polygon still exists. It's terrible.
People still play first-person shooters with controllers. I certainly don't mean to imply that the use of a controller instead of a mouse is the sole or primary reason for such spectacularly awful performance. However, even such a woefully inept and inexperienced player could have produced a more bearable and less embarrassing video with the use of a mouse, and even the best player's aiming is jerky and unnatural with a controller. The video is hard to watch for reasons that have nothing to do with skill. Every video of a first-person shooter being played with thumbsticks gives me motion sickness. "A mouse makes the game too easy" is always the first retort from people who think they need to defend their favorite toy from my opinions, but in any decent shooter, placing the reticle on a target is more of a basic requisite skill than a meaningful challenge, so there's no excuse for making it artificially hard by aiming with a device which is bad for aiming. Even video game developers know this, which is why console shooters have aim assistance. They don't want you to suck at aiming, but controllers are so awful that the game designers need to help you to not suck at aiming. Every good first-person shooter is better with a mouse and keyboard. Every player who is good with a controller can be better with a mouse and keyboard. No one can refute this with a straight face.
I'm tired and angry now. I can't even finish writing this.
It's amazing how quickly half a year can go by when you're working full-time. This blog looks abandoned. I'm still alive, though, and I'm still finding the time to enjoy my favorite time-wasting pastime despite a lack of time. I'm even still following game industry news, to some extent, even though I rarely buy new games anymore, and even though the current state of the game industry and today's so-called "gamer" "culture" make me sick. Sometimes I do want to abandon this blog and never write about games again because the whole thing has become such a joke.
I guess that's why, recently, I've been playing a lot of older games like Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi (which was fantastic), and if not older games then remakes of older games, like the latest Gauntlet (which is definitely not bad with friends). But, apparently, not even old and old-school games are safe anymore.
Last week, the Siege of Dragonspear expansion for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition was released, and the Internet exploded upon discovering in the game some sparse but hard-to-overlook examples of what many believe to be ham-fisted progressive agenda-pushing and unnecessary injection of obnoxious political correctness. One controversial scene in the game is a cringe-worthy exchange with what appears to be a token transgendered character who, of course, brings up her gender transition so that we all know how progressive the writers are.
But hey, like, whatever. Let's all chill out and stuff. Right? Ultimately, as Siege of Dragonspear writer Amber Scott already pointed out back in August 2015 — in response to another discussion of the appropriateness of putting token minority characters in video games — she has the same right to creative freedom as any other writer.
Creators have the right to create whatever they want, just as customers have the right to refrain from buying those products if they don't like what they see. "Don't like it, don't buy it" is the law of the universe, as always. Sure, the character might have been a deliberate social-justice insert, but is it really hurting anyone? Of course not. So, if that's really what the developers want to do, I can only wish them good luck with it.
But then there's the character Minsc blurting out some line about "ethics in heroic adventuring" as if it were meant to get big laughs. Someone, please, just stab me in the face.
For readers who are not aware, the "ethics" gag is a reference to a stale joke from the early days of the GamerGate controversy that started back in 2014: "Actually, it's about ethics in game journalism!" The frequently repeated but rarely funny phrase, delivered sarcastically, was usually intended as dismissive mockery of the voices behind the #GamerGate hashtag, who claimed their interest was in ethics (i.e., the radical idea that game journalists should not write positive coverage and positive reviews for their friends or for others in return for personal favors). The implication here is that the true goal of GamerGate is not ethics but rather the random harassment females/minorities/liberals in video game journalism/development/fandom (take your pick of each), as GamerGate's opponents and the mainstream media have often claimed with cherry-picked online posts from anonymous nobodies as evidence.
I say this is usually how the joke was used because, occasionally, the most strongly anti-GamerGate folk seemed to be taking it a step further by actually making ethics itself the butt of the joke, unironically implying that good ethics is not something to which people should aspire but rather some kind of tool of oppression. Presumably these are the same people who balk at the use of evidence and facts and the idea of "innocent until proven guilty" when it comes to judging those accused of crimes against members underprivileged groups, for which, I guess, an accusation is supposed to be as good as a conviction. Likewise I can only assume these are the same people who criticize the very idea of free speech in the same way, as if they don't realize that free speech is exactly what allows them to be so annoying.
But none of this has anything to do with video games, right? Really, I shouldn't be able to come up with any excuse to bring up these issues on a video game blog. But in following "gaming" news, and in paying even a minimal amount of attention to the goings on in "gaming" culture, I've found that this social "justice" insanity is nearly impossible to avoid.
Regarding the "ethics" line, it's even less funny now than it was back then. It's not even topical anymore. The joke was already old when, in yet another slightly altered form, it was awkwardly slapped onto a page of a Thor comic last year. I'm sure all the social justice warriors high-fived each other, but readers who hadn't had the misfortune of stumbling upon idiotic Twitter drama were probably left bewildered by the extremely forced and obscure reference to something that had pretty much nothing to do with comics or anything about which actual comics readers are likely to care.
Putting this nonsense in Baldur's Gate is even more pathetic, given the timing. A year ago, some people might still have cared enough about GamerGate to be offended or amused by this, depending on their political views, but now I find it hard to imagine any reaction from anyone except a cringe and perhaps a disappointed sigh. It's frustrating to see a professional writer leave such a poop stain of an esoteric inside "joke" in a game which might otherwise have been good. Now, at least in the one moment in which a player hears that line, it's not good. While this single line isn't really capable of spoiling the whole product, it sure is a "wow that was stupid" moment. At worst, it's an inappropriate political statement shoved into a game where it doesn't belong. At best, it's a meme shoved into a game where it doesn't belong. And, last time I checked, game developers who use Internet memes as jokes in their games are no-talent hacks, regardless of your political leanings.
Honestly, though, in all seriousness, it's not just the one line that convinced me not to buy this game. I very much doubt that the overall writing quality is any good in a game written by someone who feels compelled to put anything like this in a final product.
To make matters worse, Siege of Dragonspear developer Beamdog's CEO, Trent Oster, can be seen on the Beamdog forums begging for positive reviews to counter-balance the negative ones which he sees as illegitimate:
Whether the severity of the low scores given to the game in those negative reviews are fair or not, asking customers to post positive reviews en masse with the specific goal of affecting a game's overall score is unprofessional. People who like the game enough to warrant a positive review will post one without being asked. More importantly, when one of those people does write a review, the given score should be a reflection of the game's quality according to that individual, not an attempt to exert the maximum influence on the average. When customers start writing reviews with the overall score in mind, the result is a misleading pile of zeros and tens with nothing in between, which is helpful to no
one.
This last part doesn't really apply to Steam in particular, where "recommended" and "not recommended" are the only two scores that exist, but attempting to raise an army of like-minded reviewers is still an attempt to game the system. And yes, customers will often try to manipulate the average even when they aren't told to do so; there are already too many zeros, according at least to Oster, and he seems to think this is the reason. But I think it's likely that a lot of the negative reviews (many of which don't even mention the controversies described here) are not from trolls but from legitimately unhappy customers. It's not up to Oster to say that their reviews are any less real than the ones he's encouraging Beamdog's forum users to write.
Update (Wednesday, April 6, 2016)
I fully expected Beamdog to stick to their guns, to double down, to meet every complaint about any aspect of their game with an automatic accusation of bigotry while hiding behind a female writer and her poorly received (albeit well-intended) minority character. I didn't expect any acknowledgement of the game's shortcomings, and I certainly didn't expect any promises to make things better. But they surprised me. In another post on the Beamdog forums, CEO Trent Oster gives a quick recap of the negative reactions to the game and outlines some future changes.
While he expresses pride in the game (of course), and takes a clear stance
against the harassment directed at the company's employees by angry
internet people (of course), he also accepts the negative feedback on the transgendered Mizhena, namely that there wasn't sufficient character development to make her anything more than a token gesture of inclusiveness. Further down in the post, he mentions plans to patch up various bugs, to fix problems with the game's multiplayer mode, and even to remove the controversial (but mostly embarrassingly dumb) "ethics" line uttered by Minsc.
Like Oster's plea for positive reviews, this post is likely a reaction to the negative reviews flooding various sites. Last time I checked the reviews on the same three sites Oster had mentioned in his April 3rd forum post, my findings were as follows:
average feedback for the game was "mixed" on Steam, with 69% of reviews being positive, but with negative reviews absolutely dominating the "most helpful" list;
the user score on Metacritic was 3.8 out of 10, again with negative reviews rising to the top of the "most helpful" list;
the average rating on GOG was three-and-a-half out of five stars, with lots of negative reviews in the first few pages of a list which appeared to be sorted by helpfulness ratings like the others.
So maybe Beamdog is just backpedaling now in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding. But if they're going to make an effort to make the game more fun and less obnoxious, it doesn't really matter why.
A notable drawback of simultaneously having both a blog and a life that my free time doesn't always synchronize so terribly well with the most blog-worthy of current events in the world of video games. As a result, a lot of what I'd love to write just doesn't get written; and what does get written, if time-sensitive, is often late. What I'm writing now is an example of the latter.
First, before I begin, let me make clear that I don't have much of an opinion on Jimmy Kimmel or his show. I've never seen an entire episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live. I know Kimmel best as co-host of The Man Show,
and that was so long ago that I hardly remember anything except for
girls on trampolines in the credits. My point is that I'm unbiased
regarding Kimmel himself. I have no reason to dislike him, but I certainly wouldn't call myself a fan.
My
only bias is my affinity for video games. And yet, somehow, I'm
finding that my opinion on what follows is practically opposite that
of the so-called "gaming community" (or, at least, of those who are so utterly convinced that they represent it).
It was at the end of last week that the Jimmy Kimmel Live segment on the recent launch of YouTube Gaming (embedded below) was uploaded to YouTube itself.
The response was far more hilariously impotent rage than should ever be
directed at a comedy sketch. It's no surprise that anything critical of
YouTube users would get an incredibly high proportion of "dislikes" from
YouTube users (and thus the low rating on the video is expected), but there's also something else going on. The "gamers"
of YouTube, perhaps out to prove the stereotype that nerds take things
too seriously, have all but formally declared war.
"...sincerely the entire gaming community," writes one presumptuous moron after having a big cry. Try again, buddy. I don't like to call myself a "gamer" but I'm still a part of the so-called community which you're pretending to represent, and I think Jimmy Kimmel did nothing wrong.
Frankly, the whole thing is an embarrassment. I was embarrassed for YouTube even before I watched Kimmel cherry-pick the most insane comments he could find for his on-air response to the idiotic controversy. The fact that people are actually mad about a comedy sketch is bad enough. It was a comedy sketch. Moreover, as comedy often does, it made a good point.
And maybe that's why everyone on YouTube is so mad. Do people get this angry when they actually believe they're right? The point of view put forth in Kimmel's segment — that it's so ridiculous for someone to watch live-streaming or pre-recorded video of a game someone else is playing — could be met with any number of counter-arguments. None of them, however, require all the screaming and crying that the YouTube community has done in the name of "gamers" this week. That's just evidence that Kimmel struck a nerve.
Furthermore, while everyone seems to think Kimmel was mocking "gamers" in that first video, he actually did no such thing. He made fun of people who watch people play video games, a group which surely overlaps with "gamers" but not fully. The backlash against Kimmel, therefore, isn't coming from "gamers" as a whole. It isn't coming from the entire community of video game consumers, a significant portion of whom don't even use YouTube on a regular basis and would agree with Kimmel that watching other people play video games all day is ridiculous. Most likely, the backlash against Kimmel's jokes is coming instead from YouTube content creators and their fans. In other words, it's all of the people who watch videos of Minecraft for hours on end, but not all of the people who play Minecraft for hours on end.
For the record: I'm not saying I hate YouTube, or the people who post videos of video games on YouTube, or the people who watch those videos. I'm just saying the YouTube community, collectively, got a little too heated over this situation. People who are upset with Kimmel should try to be a little more understanding of the fact that, to the uninitiated, the idea of going on the internet to watch other people play video games is a little bizarre.
Technically, people watching other people play video games is nothing new, and it's not that unusual when you think about it. People have been doing it since long before this thing called YouTube Gaming was launched, and I'm not just referring Twitch. Watching people play video games wasn't invented on the internet. Most of the times I ever watched my brothers play video games at home, or watched strangers play video games in arcades, I was just waiting for my turn; however, sometimes spectating is genuinely entertaining, depending on the game and how spectacularly the player is either succeeding or failing at it.
On the internet, meanwhile, the act of watching footage of another person playing a game was old news even before streaming caught on. For many years, players have uploaded video walkthroughs, video reviews, machinima, and speedruns as well as other miscellaneous shows of skill. Video game tournaments have, for quite some time, been a spectator sport. I've seen a few speedrunning events (like AGDQ) and some tournaments (like EVO), and sometimes it's fairly entertaining even if I've never played the game in question.
Much of the "gaming" content on YouTube, however, is of the type seen only offline before broadband internet connections made uploading, downloading, and streaming high-quality video a trivial task. This stuff is more akin to watching your brother hog the television than to watching an e-sports tournament. I'm referring, of course, to the countless hours of videos and live streams of essentially random people — some of them minor internet personalities and other not-really-famous people — literally just playing video games — not for educational purposes, not for bragging rights, and not competitively, but just casually — and sometimes providing commentary while doing so. PewDiePie became the biggest thing on YouTube by doing this. Sure, he's an anomaly, but the popularity of this type of content is not limited to one weirdly successful guy.
I won't waste a lot of space explaining why I'm not the biggest fan of this particular genre of video, mostly because Kimmel already did it for me. His segment on YouTube Gaming was, after all, a mockery of this type of content specifically. The sketch clearly wasn't poking fun at instructional video walkthroughs, it almost certainly wasn't about live-streamed video game tournaments, and I'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with speedrunning. The joke was based on the absurdity of the idea that someone, rather than just playing a game, would prefer to watch someone else do it. There's no mockery of anything educational or competitive. The casual live stream and the "Let's Play" video, collectively, are the butt of this joke.
This is why it's so weird that "people watch sports" is such a frequently recurring comeback to Kimmel's video. Yes, people do watch sports; and in some contexts, watching video games is no different. But you have to be careful about how you use this analogy.
"Why do people watch sports?" the argument goes. "Anyone could just play sports, right?" I suppose we should note here that some people are disabled and cannot, but for the sake of argument, let's just pretend that everyone could play sports. "So why watch them?" It's because the sports on TV are played by professionals. They're good at it. While (almost) anyone could play sports, not everyone can play them at the professional level, and not everyone can play them so well.
So the sports analogy is great if you want to justify watching someone play a video game at a level of skill you are unlikely ever to reach. Unfortunately, much of the content on YouTube Gaming still doesn't apply.
Are you watching a speedrun? Are you watching a tournament? If you're watching either of these, then the analogy works. You're witnessing an impressive show of skill in a competitive (sometimes professional) environment to which you likely do not have access, and this is much like televised sports.
Are you watching some "funny" guy make weird noises and silly faces while playing some meme-game like Five Nights at Freddy's? Are you watching a scantily clad individual pose lewdly while some game is paused and minimized to the corner of the screen (and donations from viewers too afraid to find a proper porn stream are going through the roof)? If you're watching either of these, then no, that's not the same as watching televised sports at all. You could argue that it's entertaining for any number of reasons, but the sports analogy is no good.
Saying people watch videos for educational purposes works much better as a catch-all excuse for YouTube Gaming's entire existence. Technically, it only applies to actual video walkthroughs and other instructional content, but theoretically, any video of someone playing a game might happen to show the correct solution to your in-game problem. The average "Let's Play" series would make an incredibly inefficient walkthrough, but pretending it's educational is a lot less ridiculous than pretending it's anything like a sport.
Less convoluted justifications for watching "Let's Play" videos, and live streams of people playing video games, are these:
I can't afford to buy every game, so I want to watch a guy play this game so I can see what it's like without relying on carefully edited trailers which are sure to make the game look better than it is in reality.
The guy playing this game is just entertaining, and his reactions and commentary on this game are doubly entertaining because I like this video game too.
Video games are basically movies now, full of visual spectacle and humor and drama, and if this kind of stuff happens to be the main appeal of a particular game whose budget was spent on aesthetics at the expense of entertaining gameplay, then I might as well watch the game rather than play it.
You can't tell me what to do! I do what I want!
In any case, do you really need an excuse for your personal habits or a good counter-argument to the implications of some comedy sketch? (Hint: No.) The winning move was to laugh it off and move on, but YouTube's community lost hard by getting mad about it. More accurate analogies and more eloquently written objections to Kimmel's joke would not have saved them.
In summary: YouTube comments are still the butthole of the internet.
